


The Shanghai

by vinnie2757



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Explicit Language, Found Family, Gen, cid doesnt have a backstory really but he does now, hints of ptsd showing across characters, i love these ocs and i have loor to blame, in line with fly me back to earth, palmer is a bellend but we tolerate him for space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:14:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24441178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinnie2757/pseuds/vinnie2757
Summary: Cid, discharged and at a loose end, enters a bar and meets his future.
Relationships: cid and his found family
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	The Shanghai

**Author's Note:**

> I love Cid a lot, but we knew this.

It’s been raining and he’s damp by the time he gives in to the cramping in his stomach and goes to get food. A couple of the squaddies had told him that the _Shanghai_ was the place to get a decent meal, even if it was named after a Wutaian dish, and he supposes it’s better than nothing. They assure him it’s not just Wutaian food there, that it does other dishes, and decent beer, and he’s less interested in that, but it’s not the worst option in the world.

Hot food and a roof for a few hours, that’s fair enough.

So he treks his way across the Sector and finds it in the furthest back corner, immediately obvious as one of the pop-ups since the war started. A squaddie bar, certainly, and he licks his lips, stands and stares at the door for a moment. He’s not entirely sure, judging from the reports that have been flying around the past couple of weeks, whether he’s going to be welcome in a post-war bar. The air force have had – they haven’t had the best reception among the ground troops, given what they had to work with when they first went up. The improvements to the plane design had been helpful, but it hadn’t negated _all_ of the damage they’d been able to do and had done.

He looks at the creases of his palms, and then swallows. They can’t turn custom away, and it’s not like it’s obvious who he is. He gave his flight jacket away a week ago, to a kid that needed it more than he did, because he’s used to the mountains, the high air, the cold. He can handle it. And his tags are safely under his t-shirt, and – well, he’s not shaved in a couple weeks, and he barely looks like the propaganda bullshit photographs they’d taken of him. Feels like a lifetime ago, and he supposes it’s been the better part of six years he’s been up there.

Having his feet on the ground is still – it feels wrong. He itches for the sky, but it could just be sweat.

‘Fuck it,’ he says to himself, and pushes the door open.

The bar’s half full, and only a couple eyes turn up to look at him as he steps over the threshold. It smells like beer and fresh bread, and it’s dimly lit, the loud buzz of the electrics. He breathes once, twice, and swallows, approaches the bar. It’s manned – arguably – by a woman in her thirties, dark hair pulled off her face, towel over her shoulder, her sleeves pushed up to her elbows. She’s chatting, animatedly, to a hulking giant of a man at the far side of the bar. He’s wiping down the surface, laughing at something she’s saying. He’s shaved on the head with a beard to his collar and Cid – he’s a soldier, that much is _obvious_.

Cid draws another breath, swallows again, and goes to the bar.

‘Hi,’ the woman says, ‘a new face, eh? What’s your poison?’

The top shelf liquor is halfway to his teeth before he licks his lips and says, ‘tea, if you’ve got any?’

It comes out of his mouth a question, and he wonders if, two years ago, he’d have ever _asked_.

‘We do,’ she says, ‘first cup’s on me, you look like you’ve been outside for a long while. John, put the kettle on?’

The hulking giant with the shoulders like a bull nods and lifts the flap to disappear behind the bar and through the door to get to the kitchen.

‘You alright?’ the woman asks, and Cid eases himself into a stool, nods.

‘Yeah.’

‘Tired,’ she surmises, and he snorts.

‘Yeah.’

She taps the bar twice, and tells him that the menu’s above his head, he can take his time picking what he wants.

‘Not on me,’ she says with a smile, ‘but easily the most competitive.’

‘I’ve heard,’ Cid nods, ‘I was told your food was good.’

She looks at him then, and something crosses her face; recognition, perhaps. But whether it’s a recognition that he served, or that he’s the poster-boy of the air force, he doesn’t know, and she doesn’t let on.

The tea comes back to him a few minutes later, and he holds it in his hands, feels the heat of the porcelain against the blisters on his palms. The buzz of the lights, the refrigerator at the back, the TV in the corner of the bar, sound low, the radio on the other side, sound higher, it’s making him sleepy, the way that the hum of his plane on standby had taught him to be sleepy, and he blinks himself awake again, takes in the bar at large.

A few traumatised kids, ground troops that served too young, and he’s sick of the sight of them. There’s too many of them, too many fucking _kids_ being dragged into this war, and he says it like he wasn’t seventeen when he enlisted, wasn’t eighteen the first time he pulled the trigger, wasn’t even twenty before the new planes had made his job – easy. There’s too many kids, and he hates that there are more coming home every day, for what a home Midgar is.

He notes the giant – John, hovering by the radio, cleaning that end of the bar now.

Across from the kids, huddled together and sharing a plate of chips, there’s a couple of those brutes that he saw in training, the kind that were all muscle and no brain, lived for the idea of killing someone else. They had no business being in the army, but Cid supposes that is why he was only ever a Captain and Heidegger is in charge of the war.

Peace Preservation his ass.

In the end, he orders pasta, because it’s sensible, and his mum didn’t raise him to be an idiot, and the woman nods, smiles, takes his Gil and asks if he wants another cup of tea.

‘No,’ he says, ‘no it’s okay. This is fine.’

It’s half-drunk and stone cold, but it’s better than nothing. He says nothing when, ten minutes later, she takes the empty cup and refills it.

‘Shh,’ she says, conspiratorially, in the kind of way you know it’s not a secret at all, ‘don’t tell my husband.’

Cid glances across at John, wringing his hands at something on the radio.

‘More news about the war,’ the woman supposes, following his gaze. ‘It usually plays around this time.’

Cid nods, expects it’s more tales of the SOLDIER bravery that’s been on display all over town.

She disappears and returns with his food, and he hadn’t asked for bread, but she gives him bread anyway, and he begins to understand why the squaddies are recommending this place. If he survives the night, he might come back and eat here again, because the pasta’s fucking delicious.

The warmth of the food, the hum of the electrics, it begins to lull him, and he’s almost about to let his guard down when he feels it. You don’t serve without feeling it, and he feels everyone else in the room stiffen too. Behind him, he can hear a debate – to put it mildly – begin, and pauses, fork halfway to his mouth. Then he tells himself it isn’t his business, and it isn’t his establishment, and he just wants to eat his food. That’s all he wants to do. He’s not going to get involved.

Then the first punch is thrown, and the woman lets out a cry.

‘Not _again_!’ she cries, and Cid isn’t at all surprised. ‘John, get him out of here!’

It’s the yelp of pain that gets Cid on his feet. He doesn’t even think about it, twists off his stool and slips past John, who’s trying to get into the middle of the fight. He takes a second to observe, and while John’s wrestling with the big guy – because of course it was the big guy – he gets in between them and grabs the kid that had been wailed on.

‘Hey,’ he says, grabs his shoulders, his face, holds him still to look at him, ‘look at me.’

The kid is wild-eyed, barely twenty by the look of him, all skin and bone and Cid has seen this kid so many times on so many different faces. Fuck sake, he _hates_ this. The kid’s got a bloody nose, and he’ll have two black eyes, but nothing’s broken, he’s just banged up.

‘You’re going to be alright,’ he says, ‘dickhead behind me, he’s all that’s wrong with this fucking war, and you ain’t to blame. You’re going to be alright, you’ll get yourself a happy life and you’ll make something more than that fucking idiot. You done your time. You’ve done it. There’s no shame in being here now, none at all. You ain’t worse than the ones who died, and you ain’t better neither. It’s the way it is, and you’re going to be alright.’

The kid is staring at him, and Cid’s never really been one for motivational speeches, or speeches of any sort, to think of it, but the kid needs to hear it, and Cid knows this, because _he_ needs to hear it. He knows it, in his gut, but there’s just so much spinning around his head, and it’s hard – it’s hard to put that shit aside. He’s managing, alright enough, because he has to. Put it all in boxes, and think about it another day.

Slowly, face still in Cid’s hands, the kid nods, and Cid watches as John manhandles the fucking stupid big guy out of the bar, having none of his rhetoric, shutting down all of his bullshit, and out the bastard goes. Dusting his hands off, John turns back, and Cid claps the kid on the shoulder, pushes him back down into his seat, and returns to his pasta.

With a groan, John sits next to him, and Cid doesn’t want to talk to him, deliberately shoves too much pasta in his mouth so that he can’t speak.

John seems determined to wait him out, but Cid hasn’t spent six years in a plane to not know how to keep his mouth shut, and eventually John says, ‘thanks for that.’

‘Did what anyone would do.’

John tries to wait him out a little longer, but Cid has nothing to say, and eventually he gives up, goes back to the radio, which is spouting some bullshit death figure that grossly underestimates the actual number of casualties from the war.

‘Hey,’ the woman says, when he’s finished eating and has fished a packet of cigarettes out of his trousers. ‘You did a good thing there.’

Cid bites the back of his lip, stares resolutely at his cigarettes. He gets one out and fumbles the lighter once, twice. She lays her hands, gently, atop his, eases the lighter from between his fingers, lights it first time.

‘It’s okay,’ she tells him, and waits for him to take the first drag, press the sides of his hands firm against the bar to hide how much they shake. ‘You’ll get no judgement here.’

‘I’m one of those fucking flyboys,’ he says, ‘that the dickhead was spitting about.’

She smiles, sadly. ‘I know,’ she says, ‘you flyboys all carry yourselves in a certain way.’

Cid bites the back of his lip again. ‘I’ll leave, in a minute,’ he says.

‘Have you somewhere safe to stay tonight?’ she asks.

And the answer is no, and Cid knows she knows that. He takes a drag of the cigarette, exhales into his chest so that the smoke doesn’t go in her face, leaning on the counter the way she is. She waits, and then smiles when he shakes his head.

‘We’ve got a room,’ she says, ‘usually do. Consider it thanks, for help with the fight.’

‘I can’t take it,’ he says, and she narrows her eyes at him.

‘Don’t argue,’ she tells him, gentle enough.

‘Do you – have a phone?’ he asks, and it surprises him how quickly the next words tumble out of his mouth. ‘I haven’t spoken to my mum since I was discharged.’

This woman, with her smart eyes, and her kind hands, she reminds him of his mother, and he supposes he better let her know he’s alive.

‘Out the back,’ she says, nodding her head in the direction. ‘Take your cigarette with you, have a good chat. I’m sure she misses you.’

She lifts the flap of the bar for him, and he slinks through, thanks her quietly. As he puts the number in, he hears her say his name, and he doesn’t know if he hates that she knows who he is or not. He puts it in a box along with the rest of it, and puts the phone to his ear.

‘Catherine,’ comes the greeting, when the line connects.

‘It’s me,’ he says, after a pause where he thinks he might choke on the smoke in his lungs.

‘Cid,’ his mother breathes, relieved and furious at once, in the way she always says his name when he’s in trouble. ‘Why is it I have to hear about you being discharged from Johnny’s mother and not you?’

She knows exactly why he hasn’t called, and he knows that, and she knows that he knows that.

They don’t talk about the war, beyond that it exists. She congratulates him on becoming a captain. They don’t talk about what he’s going to do now; he barely talks at all. She fills him in on everything that’s gone on since he left, the births and deaths and marriages, a problem with the well, the latest crop drama, the finds over the far side of the mountains, down by the forest where all the dragons lay. She tells him that there’s been some monsters appearing on the mountains, but it’s nothing they can’t handle, and he believes her. His mother is mad enough to hit a monster with a frying pan, and do it hard enough to rattle the little brains it has, so he’s not worried for her safety.

‘I love you,’ she says, ‘whatever happens to you next, I love you.’

‘I’m not going to _die_ , Mum,’ he says, rolls his eyes.

‘You keep smoking those godawful cigarettes and you will.’

‘How the _fuck_ do you know that?’

‘I’m your mother, Cid, I know an awful lot more than you give me credit for. And don’t swear at me.’

Said like she’s not the one that taught him how to swear.

‘Love you too, Mum. But get off my back, I’m a grown man.’

She laughs, and bids him goodbye. Putting the phone away, he stares at it for a second, and then returns to the bar. Reine, as is the woman’s name, refuses to let him leave, and drags him upstairs to a room with a bed and a washbasin and a view over the neon lights of the city. He lies in the bed for three hours before his muscles ache. It’s too soft, in a way he didn’t expect a bed to be too soft, and it’s too quiet up here. He sits up and stares at the wall for several minutes, his head buzzing with the exhaustion of not being able to sleep, and then he pulls his trousers on. Feet bare and toes cold, he creeps to the door, opens it slowly to avoid a creak, and listens. There’s no movement, just the silence of the hallway. He listens to it for a moment, and then a late train rattles a block away, too loud and he jumps, teeth gritted. It sounds, for a second, until he recognises it, like gunfire. Fuck sake.

Heart leaping about in his chest, he goes to the stairs, pads down and into corner of the bar where the fridge stands. It buzzes, a comforting, familiar electronic hum, and he drags one of the chairs over, curls himself into it and rests his temple against the metal. It’s warm, and he watches the shadows flutter before the hum claims him, and he dozes off.

He wakes, a few hours later, to the door being smashed into his face and very nearly breaking his nose.

‘Fucking _hell_!’ he snaps, leaping upright and clutching at his bloody nose. ‘Fuck sake, what the fuck?’

‘Eloquent,’ John snorts, to disguise the fact his hand is on his heart. ‘Didn’t even see you there, fuck sake, you a flyboy or one of those Wutaian sneaks?’

Cid looks at his hand, covered in blood, and if he had the energy, he’d glare.

‘I _was_ a flyboy,’ he grunts, and flops back into the chair, wipes his nose on his arm. ‘Discharged now, aren’t I? Ain’t shit and all, now.’

John shrugs, and gets what he went to the fridge for, shutting the door again.

‘It’s a really weird place to sleep, kid,’ he says, ‘you have a bed, you know?’

‘Can’t sleep there. It’s too quiet. I – I slept in the plane a lot. Used to the noise of the electrics.’

John shrugs again. He looks different in his pyjamas, which are really just a pair of plaid bottoms and no shirt. He’s got scars, and Cid wants to ask, just to know if they’re from the war. If it was the friendly fire.

But he keeps his mouth shut, and wipes his nose again.

‘Yeah,’ John says eventually. ‘I get that. Just – make yourself visible, eh?’

Cid nods, wipes his hands on his trousers, and rests his head back against the metal. ‘Sure thing, boss.’

John lingers for a second, and Cid knows that in the morning proper, when Reine comes downstairs to find him still curled up with tight calves and a stiff neck, that she’ll tell him he’s a foolish boy for sleeping in such a cramped and uncomfortable place, because John will tell her that he’s there. But he’s tired, and he wants to sleep, and he wants to just _rest_ , for a few hours.

Reine does find him there, and gently touches his ankle, holds it with a firmer grip than he expected because she knows well enough to know that a soldier, no matter what kind, will automatically kick. He twitches, but had expected her, and manages to convince his brain that instincts aren’t necessary, considering the damage he knows he’d do if he did kick her, bare feet or not. You don’t grow up in Deist with his name without most of your strength being in your heel.

‘Tell me something,’ she says, peering up at him with something knowing and warm in her eyes.

‘If I can.’

‘What are you doing today?’

He blinks, and then curls his lip, nose wrinkling.

‘I – I don’t understand.’

‘It’s a simple question, Cid.’

It’s the first time he’s heard his name in weeks, his mother excluded. It sounds right in her mouth, warm and familiar and belonging, and he hates that it sounds the exact same as when his mother says it, trouble aside.

‘I don’t have any plans,’ he tells her.

‘Good, you can run a couple of errands for me, then.’

He doesn’t want to run errands for her, but John is busy doing not a whole lot, and so he’s the only free hands she’s got, and that means he has to do it. He washes, and dresses, and she hands him a list.

‘Can you pick these things up for me? It’s not much, but we’re getting short, and the regulars will complain. I’ll give you the Gil, of course.’

He looks at the list; it’s not a lot, as she says, but he wrinkles his nose at it all the same.

‘I don’t know why you expect me to do it,’ he says.

‘Because you’ve got a decent pair of arms on you,’ she snorts, ‘and I would like to be able to use them for a few jobs. Many hands make light work, Captain, you know this.’

Many hands get lots of people killed, too, but he doesn’t tell her that. Just says yes ma’am and takes the Gil she offers. He leaves, and it’s only when he’s on the train to the next sector, because that’s where the best tea shop is, that he realises that he could just. Not go back. She’s given him a decent amount of Gil. Hell, he could get out of the city for that. Just leave, and never come back. Go to Kalm, maybe. If he picks up a spear, or a decent knife and a big stick, he could make one, he could easily just – make his way anywhere. Home maybe. Deist is waiting for him, his _mother_ is waiting for him. He knows this. They’d be happy to have him in the village, doing the digs for whatever lunatic items they think the dragons hoarded there. And he could make a decent life for himself there.

He shakes his head, looks at the other people on the train, ShinRa employees in their smart suits, interns with their brightly-coloured lanyards, the kids with nothing better to do, a drunk at the end of the carriage, who’s made that section of seats his kingdom. He can’t go home. He could make himself a life there, but he wouldn’t be happy. Nothing there would make him happy.

‘So,’ he says to himself, and stares at the map. ‘What now?’

He buys the items on the list, and his arms are aching by the time he’s carried it all the way back to the bar. Reine is grateful to him, pays him with hot food and fresh soap.

The next day is the same; more errands, more things for him to occupy himself with, and the day after that too. Before he really realises what she’s done, he’s been there nearly a fortnight. The war is still raging, and he continues to sleep by the fridge. She swaps out the uncomfortable chair with a nicer armchair, and he swaps it back. She purses her lips at him, but his smile, shaky and not-really-there, tells her to let it be.

There are a few more fights in the bar, because that’s just the way of squaddies with nothing better to do than drink their fill and find fault in other squaddies’ trauma, as though the collective isn’t enough. He helps John pull the fights apart, always goes for the smaller man, gives a poorly constructed speech about bettering yourself, and Reine always looks at him with this peculiar sadness when he sits back down.

He has a few nightmares, and often John will appear, even though Cid is quiet with his nightmares, pacing about the bar like a caged animal, and they’ll sit on the step and watch the midnight streets pass them by, Cid smoking through a string of cigarettes as long as his arm, John nursing a hot drink stiffened with cheap gin. They’ll sit there and not say a lot, though Cid will learn that John was a miner before the war, that he worked with the mythril and funded his elopement with Reine, when they were too young to have the monetary blessing of her parents, by joining the army. She’s spent the better part of two decades following him around, and now that he’s out of it, now that the war has done his knees in, they’ve settled in Midgar, opened the bar. He’d like, he says, to get out of the city, get back into the wilds of the world, and maybe open an inn in some small town somewhere, where he doesn’t have to break up fights or worry about the troops in Heidegger’s pocket – of which, he assures Cid, there are plenty, and they’re the ones to watch for – causing trouble for the sake of it.

Cid learns, too, that John’s scars are not from friendly fire, but from being on the ground in that first wave, before the air support came, though Cid snorts at it being called that, because they both know the flyboys caused more damage than they did give support, and he’s one of three survivors of his unit.

‘I watched a lot of good men die,’ he says, over the lip of his mug, staring out across the street at a couple strolling back from the theatre.

‘Yeah,’ Cid agrees, and stubs his cigarette out. ‘Yeah. Too many.’

John tells him, a little bit, of writing letters to the widows, that as much as he wishes he could, he can’t bear to visit them. There’s one over in Sector 5, and he’d like to pay a visit, because he hears she’s got a little girl now, though the soldier hadn’t said anything of his wife being pregnant, but it’s not his business, and he doesn’t think he could bear it.

Cid supposes it’s the same reason he doesn’t go home.

They sit there for a long while those nights, often still there when Reine gets up in the morning, and she gives them easy jobs to do; building a shelving unit, or replacing the beds in the guest rooms, and one day Cid checks his bank for the first time in years to find that ShinRa are – still paying him.

He comes back to the _Shanghai_ confused and a little bit buoyed by the fact he still has money. For the most part, he’s been working in physical Gil, getting paid for the odd job he’d been corralled into by Reine, and he’d grown comfortable with that, because that’s just the way Midgar is; you work cash in hand, not with bank transfers and invoices and payslips, and it had made everything so _simple_.

‘You’re looking pleased with yourself,’ Reine hums, looking up from the bread she’s making.

‘I’m still being paid a Captain’s wage,’ Cid says, and puts the groceries she’d sent him to fetch on the counter. ‘I haven’t been in the sky in what, six weeks, and they’re still fuckin’ paying me.’

Reine snorts. ‘Don’t curse yourself by mentioning it,’ she says, ‘just take their money.’

He puts the groceries away and helps himself to an apple.

‘They have to know I’ve been discharged,’ he says, ‘they’re not so stupid as to pay troops they aren’t using. I don’t get it.’

Reine shrugs, unable to give him an answer.

The answer comes a few weeks later when he’s out on errands, helping John deliver food parcels down in the slums to some for the squaddies and their bereaved loved ones. Reine is with a couple of the regulars, talking about the latest news of the war, more SOLDIER bragging and propaganda, and nothing they haven’t heard fifteen times before, when the door bangs open, and she looks up from the counter to pull a face, mouth open to chastise.

‘Oh,’ she says instead, because of all people you expect to see in your squaddie bar in some back corner of Midgar, Palmer is not one of them.

‘I’m looking for Captain Highwind,’ he announces, and the regulars at the table Reine had been talking to stiffen.

Flyboy or not, Cid had become a fixture of the bar, and was thereby considered family by the regulars, the way Reine or John were considered family. The regulars turn their heads to look at Palmer, who suddenly looks unsure of himself. Later, they will learn that this is just how Palmer is, very sure of himself up until the point he’s expected to be sure of himself, and then he will cower and bend under the pressure of it. No confidence at all, but a lot of ego. Typical ShinRa employee in that regard, but nothing they can’t handle.

‘Captain Highwind,’ Reine repeats, eyebrows raising. ‘He’s not here.’

‘I can see that,’ Palmer says, and the sweat begins to prickle at his hairline. ‘I – could you tell him I was here?’

‘If I remember,’ she nods, but with the tone of someone that clearly has no intention of doing so.

‘I would like to offer him a job.’

‘I rather think he’s done enough for you,’ Reine tells him. ‘I can’t imagine what you want with him now.’

‘I have funding and personnel for a space program,’ Palmer says, and this stops Reine in her tracks.

Cid, over the few weeks he’s been with them at the _Shanghai_ , has talked a fair bit about the stars, and space, and has done little but complain of how the light in Midgar blocks them out and you can’t see anything for the growing smog. That Palmer has heard of it tells her that he’d talked about it during the war, too, and if Cid hears of it, he’ll be convinced, no doubt. He’ll want to be part of it, no doubt about it. Reine doesn’t even know the details of what a space program entails, and she knows he’ll be involved as soon as possible.

And – she doesn’t know what to do about it. She’s not his mother, and hasn’t spoken to her about her son, and how she’s taken him in and given him as much of a home as this wild creature wearing a boy’s flesh can be given a home, let alone what they’re to do with him now he’s without an end or a purpose. He’s simply, going through the days, doing his errands and his odd jobs and eating his weight in pasta.

But he loves the stars, and Reine couldn’t – wouldn’t – keep them from him, or him from them. If Palmer can offer him a path to his dreams, then she would be wrong to stop him.

She doesn’t want him to go, though. That’s the rub of it. She likes having him around, and likes knowing that he’s safe, and cared for and keeping himself out of trouble, fights in the bar aside. She can’t give him purpose, but she doesn’t want to lose him to ShinRa. They’ve heard, over the years and years they’ve watched the company work, the horrors and the losses, the staff turnover and the horrible things they do in the dark where nobody can hold them to account. She’s heard about it, and she doesn’t want to lose him to those same horrors.

But, he’s not her son, and he’s not her property. She couldn’t stop John doing something he wanted to do, and she can’t possibly begin to try and stop Cid.

In the end, she’ll have to tell him.

But she’ll hold it off for as long as possible.

This is not to say that Cid will listen to her even if she does tell him; whether Palmer has the funding or not, Cid might turn around and decide against the whole, working for ShinRa thing. He’s done his time with them in the army, and Reine couldn’t say, with any real certainty, what he’d do.

She purses her lips.

‘Well,’ she says, because Palmer has obviously seen on her face what she’s thinking, ‘I’ll let him know.’

‘Be sure you do,’ Palmer says, and waves a hand at her, some needlessly over the top genuflection, as if offering her a courtesy. ‘I’m eager to have him on the team.’

She waits until the door’s swung shut behind him before bursting out with, ‘oh, shut the fuck up.’

The regulars are all on edge; they’ve grown used to Cid and his weird little ways. He’s a baby, same as the rest of the kids that went out to the war, and they all have the same thought; he’s too young to be swallowed up by ShinRa’s bullshit. Space exploration doesn’t seem the kind of thing they’d be into, but what can they do?

‘Say,’ one of them says, quietly, and Reine hums.

‘What is it?’

‘Do you think they mean it, or is it just another place for them to claim ownership?’

Reine snorts, and says, ‘suppose we’ll never know.’

‘You going to tell him?’

‘I have to,’ she sighs. ‘He can’t not be told.’

At which point, as if summoned, Cid appears from the backroom with a clatter, a cigarette stub in his mouth, and a bag of potatoes over his shoulder.

‘Who’s this?’ he asks.

Reine smiles, gently, shakes her head. It can wait, she thinks; his eyes are dark, his knuckles white. Whatever he’s seen out in the other Sectors today, he doesn’t need to be hearing about it now.

It takes her another two weeks to tell him, and he’s fuming that she didn’t mention it sooner.

‘Space!’ he hollers, waving his hands around and pacing up and down the length of the bar. ‘Space, Reine! You didn’t say anything!’

‘Because I don’t trust Palmer!’ she replies, desperate, because she’s lost him, and she knows it. ‘I don’t trust that they aren’t going to use you as a means to an end and discard you when they’re done!’

‘Oh, who cares?’ he snorts, ‘I’m just rotting away here, this isn’t what I want from my life! I could be up there! With the fucking stars! I could be the first man in space!’

She wrings her hands, chews on her lip. ‘Cid,’ she tries, but he’s laughing, and not listening.

‘The first man in space! Fuck it, that’s worth dying for! That’s – that’s all I’ve ever wanted! Dad was on my case about the Highwind name, and what it means, and I don’t _care_ about that! Let anyone fucking have it, I don’t give a shit about it. But – fuck sake, Reine, why didn’t you _tell me_?’

She just smiles at him, sadly. He rolls his eyes and off he stomps to the phone, muttering about how Palmer’s number better be in the phone book.

When she gets up the next morning, his chair by the fridge is empty, and his room, when she checks it, is devoid of his clothes.

He’s gone, and she doesn’t hear anything from him for six months, when John abruptly hangs up the phone one day and comes back into the bar looking contemplative.

‘So they’re desperate for help,’ he says, ‘out with the rocket program.’

‘They are, are they?’

She’s hard-nosed about it, because it hurts still, that Cid left without saying goodbye, and that he hasn’t spoken to either of them at all. Well, in truth, he hasn’t spoken to her, hurt in turn by her silence, but he’s spoken, once or twice, to John, about the project and how nobody has any control over the engineers and the mechanics and how he doesn’t regret it at all, but fuck sake, he could use a familiar hand.

‘From what I’m hearing, they’re eating instant noodles and haven’t seen an apple in the entire time they’ve been there.’

‘What the _fuck_?’ she sighs, because she knows where this is going.

‘We could go out there,’ he says, tentative, because they both know what’s going to happen, but someone has to be the one to open their mouth. ‘Open the inn out that way. They’re going to get traffic, from engineers and mechanics and oddballs wanting to see it. We always said we weren’t going to stay in Midgar, and besides, there are good hands here to take over.’

‘I’ll do it if ShinRa finances the new build,’ she says, because she’s not spending her savings on upping sticks and going for no guarantees.

‘I’ll see what we can do.’

Cid has a quiet word with Palmer, who in turn has a quiet word with that chap in Urban Development, and he doesn’t bat an eyelid at forking over however much it is to put running water and sewerage and electricity in there. It has to be provided by a generator for now, but it’s something. John goes out to oversee the build and he calls Reine in distress the first night.

‘It’s worse than I thought,’ he says, ‘how they haven’t got scurvy, I don’t know. Don’t bring any of our possessions, just bring a case of fucking oranges.’

Reine puts the phone down on him and refuses to speak to any of them. The first day that she arrives, Cid apologises to her face.

‘I shouldn’t have been mad at you,’ he says, which is close enough. ‘You were doing what you thought was right, and I shouldn’t hold that against you.’

She hums, and tells him he needs to eat right, and that she’ll make dinner for everyone if he can corral them into coming to the inn.

Years pass, and after everything, after Meteor, and Holy, and the WEAPONs and everything, after he’s opened his mouth to Shera and told her what’s what, he goes to the inn, and he asks if she’s got any tea in.

‘Always,’ she nods, and hollers to John to put the kettle on.


End file.
